Piers Lauder Conversation Notes

* Piers, wrote the imaplib for a his product Facemail. Piers worked for Bell labs in the early nineties and they had an internal product that would display an image of an email senders face next to the mail message. He created Facemail to mimic the Bell labs functionality. At the time there was no good IMAP library in Python so he wrote what would become imaplib for his own use. He posted a response to a Python posting about mail and as a result Guido van Rossum the creator of Python asked him to contribute his imaplib to the Python standard distribution. Adding faces to mail is a interesting idea and would be easy to do with in Chandler. It allows easy visual searching of mail based on the sender. Although not a mission critical feature it would be a nice to have for some future release of Chandler.

* The imaplib is extremely low level and requires an in depth knowledge of the IMAP4rev4 (rfc 2060) protocol in order to utilize it. Piers would like to see a simple to use wrapper to the imaplib that abstracts the internals of the IMAP protocol. He has heard good things about the JavaMail^? abstraction of IMAP and would hope something would be modeled on that type of approach.

* Piers is quite happy with the message parser in the lib.email package and has found it easy to use.

* The imaplib over the years has been tested again virtually every major IMAP server vendor.

* Piers has a list of Python developers who have contributed comments or code to the imaplib project. He will send the list to me. This will be useful in getting community support if Chandler decides to utilize imaplib for its IMAP api.

* Piers has not worked on the library for over a year. And has no plans to do so in the near future. He was very encouraged by my interest it and hoped Chandler would take over the library and develop an easy to use api wrapper around the low-level functionality that imaplib provides.

* There are a number of clients in addition to Useablemail and SpamBayes^? (Junk mail filter not really a client) that utilize the imaplib. He encouraged me to check out the Python site and search for mail clients.

* There are quite a few features that are missing from the current imaplib including: pipelining, internationalization, and authentication support. The current library supports the plain text LOGIN mechanism specified in the IMAPrev4 rfc.

* There is no inline support for PGP. For Facemail, Piers forks a process to a PGP program to encode the mail and then sends the result of the PGP encoding. He would greatly like to see PGP native support in Python and in the imaplib.

* There is a bug in the SSL socket library which does not parse the CR LF of the line which means the user of the SSL version of imaplib will have to manually strip the CR LF from each line.

* Piers wrote a basic wrapper for IMAP and POP that he uses in Facemail. He is going to send me a copy. The wrapper provides a rudimentary abstraction around Python's poplib and imaplib.

* Piers would potentially be open to start working on imaplib again if the support / demand was there.

-- BrianKirsch - 29 Apr 2004

Regarding PGP, the M2Crypto library we have chosen to use can do PGP (I haven't tested it though). While this requires a Python extension it should be something usable in Chandler. -- HeikkiToivonen - 30 Apr 2004